Drawing the Line between Fair Use and Plagiarism for Digital Documents

CCP (Center for Counter Plagiarism) is a tool designed to aid in the process of verifying digital documents in order to ensure their originality and appropriate usage of references. In this paper we describe the design of an interface for CCP that aims to reduce the burden of determining whether plagiarism exists by locating identical copies in the web as well as noting text that seems original. The main contribution of CCP is a simple yet meaningful graphical user interface that helps in the decision making process when drawing the line between fair use and plagiarism. We also analyze and discuss the preliminary results of performance and usability tests run on CCP.